my mind. The hour and alcohol would make her drop the decorum she might use at, say, the post office. She would note my body shape and size, attire, and demeanor at the post office too, but the schoolgirl glee at my perceived defeat is reserved for late-night encounters, times of slight intoxication. For a place where she believes I am unarmed, unwelcome.
We had just left the dance floor, and I think I bumped her arm. We’d been out dancing, and the music was ending for the night. We were coming back to ourselves—the selves that were no longer ecstatically moving, bodies pulsing rhythm. We were coming back to the selves that have to find meaning in our own lives, make decisions about who we are, how we project ourselves onto the bright canvas of culture. The bracketed existence of dance floor anonymity was finished. And though I didn’t know the woman who gave me the look, I knew how much she needed me.
What causes one to disdain another and think it is warranted? The fact that it will be excused, or even lauded, for starters. What causes a person to dismiss the humanity of another? A need to elevate oneself in a social order where most of us help ensure that some can be disdained in order that we may flourish. And that’s why the slender girl on the dance floor needed me to be fat. While she thought she didn’t want me around, she wouldn’t have known how to live without me. And her relief that she could have been me, but wasn’t, spurred the gleeful chuckle of dismissal to her affront. I gave her life authenticity.
By the bar, late at night—this was not the time for conversation, but I caught her eye and looked for a moment with real compassion. This did not even take a second, maybe half a beat. I was so out of place in this interaction, not doing my job. And, indeed, I know how to do my job: to avert my eyes and show the shame that I feel. I felt it as a child and still do at times when someone like her catches me unaware: the shame of forgetting that I am not credible, followed by the hot rage of injustice. But not that time, and less often, the older I get. I just looked at her with compassion—so different from pity. I was not afraid that I could’ve been her. I accept that I could have been her. I might ridicule another in order to elevate myself. Of course, I could. And I knew that my ability to practice kindness toward her would help us both—and probably others whom we hadn’t even met.
I just stood and stared at her, thinking: I know how much you need me. Without me, you’d have to do something with your life in order to feel good about yourself. You couldn’t just gloat about not being me. You couldn’t use me as the ballast that keeps your head from floating away thinking of all of those on the dance floor who are prettier or thinner or shapelier than you. Without me, you’d have to make someone else your scapegoat, and it might not be so easy, if there weren’t obvious physical criteria involved. You’d have to replace me or focus on who you wanted to be within yourself—not just in comparison to others.
I wanted to ask the kind of rhetorical questions that prompt reflection in a quiet moment: What must you think of yourself to elevate the size and shape of your body—perhaps what you do to make it so—to virtue? How little must you think of yourself to look at me that way and take pleasure in it?
But she didn’t know me at all. Did my demeanor say it? Did she sense me thinking, “Maybe you didn’t know, but any fat woman you meet has character and fortitude to spare for surviving a world that uses her as you’ve just used me”? Fat people may scapegoat others to find their self-worth, surely. If she thought she was so different than me, then she didn’t know me at all.
I didn’t say any of that, but, for our similarities, I seemed to know something she didn’t. She didn’t actually need to do anything in order to be worthy of respect and positive attention in the world, and neither did I. We were already fine people, just as we were. Even as she put me down, she did not deserve my put-down. How much lower can we agree to feel? No lower. No more.
I didn’t speak at all, standing on the edge of the dance floor, late at night. But if I correctly read her painful need in her quick behavior, perhaps she read my truth in a simple stare as well. Perhaps she heard me say: “Gentle, darling. No one deserves your derision. Not even you.”
5. Dances with Light
When I was six years old, my mother had my hair cut in a style she called a “pageboy.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it had the word “boy” in it and that’s exactly what strangers started calling me. I was big for my age and chubby, and my facial features were bold, as they are now. Not masculine, but bold and expressive. Long hair adds gender clarity. It can soften or reveal a face that shows emotions readily. I rejected cleverly named haircuts afterward when my mother suggested them, and my hair became a long ponytail once more.
Through my whole life, my mother’s hair was short—always fashionable, but short. She wore it dark when I was a child, and the sides came into cute little curls pointing toward her dimples, not as short as a pixie cut but the same shape. It lightened as she aged and morphed along with fashion. The length of my hair was always a point of contention between us after I became old enough to refuse the haircuts she wanted. I know she influenced the stylist because it always ended up shorter than I wanted. “Shoulder-length is still long,” she’d chirp. “But it looks so much better shorter! I don’t understand why you don’t believe me!”
In this case, she was offering advice counter to popular fashion opinion. And she definitely understood popular fashion. This was so confusing, and I thought she’d have been as ashamed as I was of the gender confusion my shorter hair caused. But perhaps she didn’t hear it as much as I did, from people like bus drivers, kids at school, and shopkeepers. None of her friends would have called me a boy. Is it possible that she didn’t want me to look feminine, cute, and fashionable? I couldn’t imagine that. It always seemed so important to her that I lose weight so that I could be exactly those things.
If it was going to be long, she wanted my hair pulled back in clips or a bun. The bun is how she styled it when I was a small child, before the pageboy. I rode the bus home from school, and the assigned seating placed me in front of two older boys who pulled out my hair pins one by one on the way home so that I always arrived in a tangle thanks to the breeze through the window. I told her it wasn’t my fault, but there I sat, as soon as I got home, being pulled by the brush, like punishment.
By the time I was eight, if I wore my hair down, she’d look at me and say, “Ew, why do you want all of that stringy hair hanging all around you. It looks like witchy-poo.” Sometimes she’d try to enlist others to reinforce her disdain of my long hair. Often they’d diplomatically mention their fondness for fashionable short cuts. Sometimes, they’d actually say, “Oh, I don’t know. She has beautiful hair.”
I had beautiful hair, soft and shiny, and its chestnut color in my early childhood darkened to sable in elementary school. Perhaps she didn’t like that I had darker hair and complexion than she did, more like my father, who was of dubious ethnic and racial origins. Whiteness was important; my father performed it well, and it’s what I learned too.
I thought I had beautiful hair. I wasn’t sure, because I valued her opinion on appearance. Modeling and fashion were her business, after all, and I knew she was skilled from the way others were always impressed with her looks. But regarding my hair, she seemed to be lying to me somehow.
One time, instead of the witchy-poo comment, she said something I didn’t understand at all and needed to ask about. I had styled my hair, which I didn’t usually do, used the curling iron and tried to fluff it a bit, though it was naturally very straight. She saw it and said, “My god, you look like a teenage thyroid case!” I was probably nine, not a teenager, and what did that thyroid comment mean? It was embarrassing to ask that an insult be explained, but I couldn’t bear not to know what she was saying about me. “It just makes your face look full,” she explained with pity in her voice. “It makes you look fatter than you are, and remember: everything you wear should give a slimming appearance.” This was just something
